School for scandal

Date: December 01 2012

Audiences are more sophisticated than ever but artists continue to find ways to outrage, writes JENNIFER SCHUESSLER.

The morning of The Rite of Spring premiere, on May 29, 1913, at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris, Le Figaro predicted the ballet would deliver ''a new thrill which will surely raise passionate discussion'' and ''leave all true artists with an unforgettable impression''. That turned out to be one of the greatest understatements of the new artistic century. The passionate discussion began during the first few bars of the music, as derisive laughter rose from the seats and soon grew into an uproar that sent Stravinsky fleeing the hall in disgust.

He and his collaborators did not intend to start a riot. But together with the brouhaha over the Armory Show of modern art a few months earlier in New York (where such outrages as Duchamp's painting Nude Descending a Staircase prompted Theodore Roosevelt to declare, ''That's not art''), the premiere helped write a modern cultural script. Artists have been trying to provoke audiences ever since, elevating shock to an artistic value, a sign they are fighting the good fight against oppressive tradition and bourgeois morality.

Shock went mainstream long ago, which raises a question: can art still shock today? Nudity and raw language are no longer scandalous, and decades of modernist assaults on formal constraints have dissolved the boundary between art and not art, high and low. The outcry over Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer seems downright quaint at a moment when millions of suburban mothers are devouring the sadomasochistic fantasy Fifty Shades of Grey.

The raw, homoerotic images in American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe's work, which sparked debate in the '80s over public support for ''obscene'' art, would surely not get the same rise in today's culture, in which homosexuality is broadly accepted and hardcore pornography is available at the click of a mouse. In the pop realm, where avant-garde aesthetics have penetrated advertising and debates over gangsta rap (to say nothing of Elvis's swivelling hips) seem a distant memory, the potential to shock seems close to vanishing altogether.

Today, shock can seem indistinguishable from scandal, less a side effect of artistic innovation than a ploy by self-promoting artists and public scolds. But many artists say generating shock remains the duty of anyone who aims to reflect the world back at itself. Audiences may be more sophisticated, and jaded, but it is still possible to show them something they might not want to see. ''Conditions in society are shocking, and art really does become a mirror to society in that way,'' says American performance artist Karen Finley, who became a symbol for shock art in the early 1990s. Sometimes that mirror turns into a magnifying glass. The furore over her politically charged work, which included smearing her body with chocolate and stuffing orifices with yams to illustrate society's degradation of women, had less to do with the work, she says, than the culture warriors who seized on it to advance their own agenda.

''You can't just say, 'I'm going to go out and try to shock people,''' she says. ''It's usually a much more subtle matter of time and place.''

In Australia, photographer Bill Henson inadvertently created a furore in 2008 when he was accused of child pornography, with police removing his work from the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery and subsequently from public collections.

Henson has little time for the notion that artists should strive to shock and infuriate. ''Some people decide they want to be controversial,'' he told the Herald's art critic, John McDonald. ''I don't know who in their right mind could be so stupid … I'm not interested in engaging with this thing called 'the public'. But … all this argy-bargy in the press becomes really boring.''

For others, though, shock can be a useful tactic. Filmmaker John Waters began his 1981 autobiography, Shock Value, with the declaration that having someone vomit while watching one of his movies was ''like getting a standing ovation''. But mere shock for shock's sake, he said recently, is ''deathly''.

''If you're shocking by subject matter alone, it's not enough, and it never was enough,'' he said. ''It's easy to shock, but it's much harder to surprise with wit.''

To him, the most shocking thing about Pink Flamingos, his 1972 exploitation classic that depicted drag queen Divine gleefully eating dog faeces, was the fact that people laughed.

''It was a commentary on censorship,'' he said. ''It was about what was left once Deep Throat became legal.''

To ask if art can still shock is to quickly invite another question: shock whom, and where? Connoisseurs of the highbrow jolts delivered, say, by European movie directors such as Lars von Trier and Gaspar Noe (whose Irreversible assaulted audiences with a nine-minute rape scene) might find themselves shocked at the guilt-free pleasure taken by fans of the torture-porn Saw franchise. And violence that might seem humdrum at the multiplex might seem shocking in a live theatre, to say nothing of an opera house.

Rite of Spring-style riots are rare but plenty of artists succeed in causing deep discomfort. When playwright Thomas Bradshaw's satire Mary, about a contemporary southern white couple who keep a slave, was staged in the US last year, it prompted a storm of criticism, including a review in The Chicago Sun-Times wondering if it was a hoax designed to test audience rebellion. Bradshaw's plays have prompted their share of walkouts, but he insists that at the performances of Mary he saw, a good part of the mostly white audience was laughing at the liberal use of racial epithets and comically genial ''slave owners'' - at least once they looked around the theatre to make sure someone else was laughing, too.''My work puts people in the position of questioning their own reactions,'' Bradshaw says. ''Modern audiences expect that if people are engaged in actions that are considered politically incorrect, they should be demonised and punished in the work. And that's not very interesting to me.''

At a recent New York performance of Job, his new play based on the Bible story, the audience had a similarly uncertain reaction to the graphic violence, which included incestuous rape, necrophilia, sodomy and an anatomically vivid castration that tipped the crowd into anxious titters.

That kind of ultra-realistic violence has become more common on the stage, even if the context tends to be less comic. Australian director Barrie Kosky never shies away from on-stage brutality and has said it is a compliment to be booed by a conservative audience. His 2008 Sydney Theatre Company production of Euripides's The Women of Troy - with a chorus of abused and bloodied women - resulted in many of the audience walking out, while others praised its harrowing power.

When Sarah Kane's Blasted had its premiere in London in 1995, one critic, in a typical reaction, compared its scenes of rape, cannibalism and serial mutilations to ''having your whole head held down in a bucket of offal''. (Many of the same critics now consider the play a contemporary classic.) The work of New York playwright Adam Rapp, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Red Light Winter, has been both hailed and reviled for fleshing out its emotional realism with drenchings of blood, vomit, diarrhoea and pus.

Such visceral shocks ''shake us out of things we take for granted'', Rapp says. ''I love putting dangerous moments on stage. It raises the stakes and brings out the nervous system in an actor. The audience's nervous system will change, too.''

But Rapp says people who focus on his plays' sensational aspects fail to appreciate the deeper shock of seeing life as it really is. Especially in a media-saturated age, he says, ''it can be incredibly powerful to see something real, to have things feel like they are really happening''.

But the feeling remains that perhaps some experiences should not be fodder for art, especially when the vulnerabilities on display are not just hyper-realistic but real. In September 11, a group show at the New York Museum of Modern Art's experimental exhibition space PS1, mounted to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, curator Peter Eleey avoided work that directly depicted the events, which for some viewers remain taboo.

But artists have not shied from shocking depictions of the violence the attacks set in motion. Eleey cited Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn's Superficial Engagement, a 2006 installation that featured gruesome photos of exploded bodies of Afghan and Iraqi war victims - bodies, as Hirschhorn put it, that had suffered ''abstraction'' by violence.

''Those images are indelibly shocking to people in the West who aren't used to seeing them in the media,'' Eleey said. ''But the way they shock goes beyond the horrific images and gets into a broader way of implicating us abstractly in a much larger system of violence.''

Such work may seem to stretch art's immunity plea - its argument that ''we are only reflecting the brutality of the world and your complicity in it'' - past the breaking point, conveniently projecting its own exploitative tendencies on the viewer. In the book, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, critic Maggie Nelson questioned the lingering hold of what she called modernism's ''shock doctrine'', summed up for her in Austrian film director Michael Haneke's stated desire to ''rape the audience into independence''.

Not that Nelson dismisses the value of confrontation. Art needs to ''say things the culture can't allow itself to hear'', she said. ''But all shock is not created equal,'' she wrote. ''Once the original 'ugh' is gone, you've got to look at what the next emotion is.''

That next emotion may be nothing more than a hunger for the next, deeper shock. And some of the canniest shock artists say that, these days, refusing to deliver it in the expected ways might be the most shocking move of all.

Waters, whose 2004 movie, A Dirty Shame, featured semen shooting out of a man's head (and hitting the camera), has a suggestion for young filmmakers out to make a mark: ''If you could think of something that would get an [adults-only] rating with no sex or violence, you would have the most radical movie of the year.''

With Louise Schwartzkoff

The New York Times

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